Ask HN: Evaluation/promotion depends not on my past performance? - <AUTHOR> I am wondering what to think of my current company in this situation:
I am a data scientist, working for about 19 months at bigcorp since graduating with a masters in AI. Past 6 months, I have been working to get a promotion. Manager and I have set a few benchmarks, and I feel I meet all the criteria. Manager and colleagues say good things about my performance.
Fast forward to now. I will move from a business department to an IT department, still be a data scientist there and do basically the same things. (creating ml solutions and bringing them to production)
Manager doesn't want to give me the promotion until I have spoken with the general IT manager and my future, lower IT manager, which will be selected next month. They have to approve my promotion, taking input from my current manager and IT colleagues I work with. The thing is, both my manager and his manager say that my skills meet all the criteria for a promotion - that my performance has been good. But I need to wait for a conversation with a yet to be chosen manager at IT to get the promotion. The reason for this is to "ensure harmony within IT" and to make sure that my promotion "fits the context in which I operate within the company". I have protested that I should be reviewed based on my past performance and market value, not my future context, but they have simply refused this.
What should I think of this? What would you do? <comment><USER2> Network with your fellow employees and consider threatening to leave. The basic dynamic of work, especially in a large corporation, is to extract value from you, not to maximize your utility. Each manager down the chain is in turn trying to maximize their executive power to climb up the chain. Developing your career as a valued employee is distinctly secondary to the strategic considerations each manager faces in trying to maximize their own benefit. If you're doing a good job right now, the manager wants to keep you on his team rather than give you away to someone in IT, with whom the business department is in competition for influence in the C-suite. Your manager doesn't derive any great benefit from giving you away to another department; the nice virtuous feeling of maximizing the collective good does nothing to advance his political position or help him meet his targets next quarter after you've gone. It just presents him with the annoying problem of trying to replace you, which is actual work.

You should read Smith & Bueno de Mesquita's _The Logic of Political Survival_ , or the simpler version presented for a more general audience _The Dictator 's Handbook_. Corporations are not little meritocratic democracies, they're zero-sum dictatorships with nice architecture. There are politics in academia, of course, but ultimately it's an unselfish environment dedicated to the maximization and democratization of knowledge. The business world offers similar looking campuses and promotes collegiality among employees etc., but to a very different end.

Since you're a data scientist, why not (either at home or during, cough, 'spare' time at work) look into the work above and start running agent-based simulations examining the structure of authoritarian hierarchy and informational asymmetries? Imagine an internal economy in which there's a floating exchange rate between information and authority, and two flavors of information: external and internal. You could og course look for emergent behaviors but since your firm already has an org chart and that's probably available somewhere on the corporate servers then you should probably use that as a real-world benchmark for your, ah, researches.

It would be most interested to hear of your findings via gmail. Protip: people in the business department like talking about The Big Picture ( _saying_ this in terms of meeting collective corporate mission goals, _meaning_ the drama of climbing the internal corporate ladder), and think of knowledge workers like your good self as borderline autistic for not being able to see the obvious path of going into management and getting other people to do the grunt work while they wield actual power.

On the plus side their relative lack of technical comprehension means you enjoy great flexibility in exactly how you structure your time and what results you produce, because managements' understanding of complexity and difficulty largely comes from you int he first place. Basically, your manager has power over you by and has no intention of cluing you in on his personal career strategy/politics, and you're confused because you know his stated explanations are bullshit.

It is perfectly OK for you to play this game back by pretending to accept his bullshit and strategically exploiting the resources available to you for your own gain as long as you give him a good story about what you're working on now. The downside is you won't get paid as much as if you got the promotion. But corporate doesn't care about _you_ ; the promotion is just a carrot to persuade you to work harder where you currently are. Put on a display of humility and drone-like belief in the wisdom of your manager (which I assure you he will be delighted to believe), then express your eagerness to pursue and aggressive new target that will redound to his glory. (Use the word 'aggressive' in describing it, this is a holy term among professional managers and will briefly cause his brain to stop working properly.) Emphasize the difficulty and novelty of the task you are about to take on and persuade him that you're ready to prove yourself again, all of which will appeal to his ego. Your goal here should be to devote about 50% of your work time to actually achieving whatever it is you have promised to do, and to apply the rest of your time to the improvement of your own strategic position. Make both considerations look like part of the same project and give him overly detailed technical explanations of how clever it is until he stops listening and gives you the go-ahead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply.

I will 'aggressively' pursue implementing that simulation right away, sir ;)

> Network with your fellow employees and consider threatening to leave.

I did exactly that, 6 weeks ago, and they now come with this bs. I am not enjoying the office politics thing and I have an offer at a startup. Do you think there is any sense in leveraging the startup offer to get a better offer at bigcorp?

Thanks also for the book suggestions.

<comment><USER2> It's certainly worth a try. Startup life can offer great opportunities, but then Bigcorp can offer much better work/life balances - it really depends on your individual calculus for time, pay, responsibility, and pressure.

I really hate politics and am like you in that I'd rather focus on outcomes and optimizing systems. but I avoided and rejected figuring this stuff out at an earlier age, only to realize that ignoring the existence of politics confers no immunity from being subject to it.

BTW if you do perform that simulation work I would genuinely be interested in hearing about it, I have far more ideas than I ave the technical skills/peer network to implement them :-/</comment></comment></comment>


Performance notes - <AUTHOR> https://traintimes.org.uk/notes/performance <comment><USER2> > Of course, it all displays fine if JavaScript is not available, defaulting > to visible – something I wish I could say was true of all sites.

Hurrah! I am very bored of sites which need you to run 100 bits of JS, often from multiple sites, before displaying any actual content? Why?

As I've said before, I try and make the first ~10kB delivered to the browser be able to render everything important above the fold, and have everything work reasonably in the absence of JS, eg for those of us running NoScript or similar out of caution.

[http://www.exnet.com/Style_Guide.html](http://www.exnet.com/Style_Guide.html)

<comment><USER3> Yes!

I have gone even more aggressive these days - just stop running JS on client machines at all. Every time a page is slow, breaks, tracks, etc, there is almost always one culprit.

My rule is now that if you can't load your page in lynx - it's broken. There are few exceptions to this rule in my eyes.

<comment><USER4> I think it very much depends on a site or web app's purpose. Clearly it's fair to say that many sites overuse JavaScript.

On the other hand offloading some computing tasks to the client can save you quite a bit in terms of hardware expenditure on the back end. Again, depends on the site, but many people now have (effectively) supercomputers, so why not leverage some of that? Sometimes it can even enhance the experience, and maybe improve both the perceived and actual performance.

There are also cases where a site simply can't be expected to work without JavaScript. One of my side-projects is an HTML5/JavaScript games site. If somebody disables JavaScript they'll get a nice message explaining why they need to enable it to play the games, otherwise what would my fallback option be? Flash? Bleurgh! No thanks.

<comment><USER2> There are indeed honourable exceptions, but they are exceptions.

The fact that on many corporate sites I cannot even get to see the company name until I have enabled JS in three rounds with NoScript is silly. Sometimes I just don't bother. As yes I am running a supercomputer right now, I quite agree, but I don't want nefarious stuff run on it. And on my mobile I don't want to be wasting my battery power on emulating Deep Thought to get past the throbber.

Most sites want you to see some text. Many don't let you see any without scads of JS.

(Note: I do use JS to enhance my sites, but the JS is small and the sites work fine without it running.)

<comment><USER4> Agreed - no text at all without JavaScript is completely ridiculous, and not at all hard to avoid so it's deeply frustrating that there are so many sites that fall foul of it. Even my site, which is a games site containing pages that _simply won't work_ without JavaScript, manages to display something useful even on these pages when it's disabled. There are also sections such as the blog that obviously work fine without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://traintimes.org.uk/live/Duddeston](https://traintimes.org.uk/live/Duddeston)

My daily commute to Walsall has been made extra-efficient through this work

Many thanks, and, for the record, works fine on Seamonkey with NoScript on OpenBSD which is pretty minority.

Well done.

</comment><comment> jackstraw- I'm working on a similar minimalizing project and really appreciate you sharing this.

These types of write-ups are some of the best resources as I've grown as a developer. It's a great feeling to come across one that exactly answers something you're stuck on, or explains some concept that you're pretty sure exists but you have no idea where to start.

</comment><comment><USER6> This site is great and I used it daily while I lived in London. Perfect for mobile. It's a real kindness of the creator to have kept it so simple and consistent over the years. I can't think of another site with as good a bytes:utility ratio.

</comment><comment><USER7> Minor quibble but in case anyone wonders like I did, the cases for units are mostly backwards. When he writes "Kb", he means "kB" (I looked at the size of the homepage, which is 10kB).

For anyone wondering what I'm talking about, the kilo prefix is lower case K, the symbol for a byte is upper case B and lower case B is a bit. Kb = kilobit with badly capitalised kilo. kB = kilobyte. kb = kilobit.

Also, interestingly, the JEDEC unit for 1024 bytes is KB while the metric one is kB. This is the only somewhat unambiguous JEDEC unit, the other two are corruptions of metric units.

<comment><USER8> > Also, interestingly, the JEDEC unit for 1024 bytes is KB while the metric > one is kB.

However the SI k prefix means 1000 (10^3) rather than 1024, which would be Ki.

<comment><USER7> Yep, sorry, I worded that pretty wrong.

Also, Ki is an IEC prefix and distinct from the metric system. Metric doesn't have anything other than decimal prefixes as far as I know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always recommend this site to anybody booking a train, it's by some distance the best available in the UK.

<comment><USER10> Never heard of it, but looks pretty great. Have you tried the Trainline app? If so, how does this conpare? Cheers

<comment><USER9> Trainline is a fairly typical commercial website. It won't work without javascript and cookies enabled, it wants to track you, it doesn't follow accessibility guidelines and is over a megabyte and a half in size. If you access it on a mobile device it has the usual annoying ad for the pointless mobile app (complete with onerous Ts & Cs, overly grasping permissions and invasive privacy policy) covering a quarter of the screen with the tiny dismiss button. In short, everything that's wrong with web development these days and defensible only because it's one of many.

By contrast traintimes.org.uk is simple, highly usable, small, accessible, respectful of privacy and works as plain html.

For me it's an easy choice but your mileage may vary!

<comment><USER11> Just to note, though, that you can book tickets with Trainline, which you can't with traintimes.org.uk, it does have limits :) However, Trainline charge a booking fee – [https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id...](https://ehelp.thetrainline.com/app/answers/popup_detail/a_id/2825/rdr/10) – and so I would suggest using any train operating company site (they all sell nearly all tickets), whichever one you find most agreeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Something that has tripped me up a bit with service workers is this:

I can use the service worker to cache all the things, and I can embed their hashes in the service worker so it knows when to refetch code that has changed, but how do I tell browsers to refetch the service worker script itself (to get the latest hashes)? I've read some people suggesting a no-cache header on just that file, although I see that isn't used here, and it seems to defeat the purpose somewhat. How do other people handle that?

EDIT: At least I'm not the only one: [https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/893](https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/893)

<comment><USER13> Browsers should do that automatically (I seem to remember something like every 24 hours?)

<comment><USER11> Yes, service workers would previously cap caching to 24 hours, see e.g. [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38843970/service- worker-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38843970/service-worker- javascript-update-frequency-every-24-hours) but as per the ticket mentioned there – [https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/893](https://github.com/w3c/ServiceWorker/issues/893) – they are moving to default no-cache, opt-in caching.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> traintimes.org.uk is a masterwork. The URL schema is simple enough to remember - always cool to tell people "just go to traintimes.org.uk/leeds/london"!

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand this part:

> If you don't have a CSS cookie set, I inline the CSS in the HTML, load the > CSS file asynchronously with a slightly adapted loadCSS JavaScript, and set > the cookie.

What is the purpose of the cookie here? Is CSS being stored _in_ the cookie? Does the value of setting the cookie exceed using an Etag to only load the CSS if it's modified?

<comment><USER11> I've reworded that bit, sorry, it wasn't very clear!

It is as krallja says; inlined on the very first request (so any caching headers such as ETag wouldn't help, though I do set them for anything subsequent) so there is no display blocking fetching the CSS needed for display (as I have little CSS, I inline all of it, but you might want critical CSS only).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A good read, though funnily enough the live departures board doesn't seem to work for the closest station to me. Nor does it seem to work for lines that have trains going in both directions.

Though to be honest most things don't, I blame being rural.

<comment><USER11> Care to email and let me know which station you're talking about, and what the issue is? Haven't had any other mentions of this that I can see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oooh that is a good work! Very nice.</comment>


Gene Editing Could Make Anyone Immune to AIDS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/gene-editing-co.html <comment><USER2> I didn't read the paper thoroughly yet, but from a brief skimming this is the gist:

The technique they used was very clever. The first step was to take what's called a zinc finger. This is a type of DNA binding protein that can specifically recognize a sequence of DNA and bind to it. In this case, they created two zinc fingers that bound to a region of the first transmembrane domain (CCR5 has 7 transmembrane domains), just upstream of the deletion in the delta32 mutation.

Then, attached to the zinc fingers is a type IIS restriction enzyme. What this does is make a double stranded cut in the DNA. In other words, it cuts both strands in half. The cell, sensing the damage, repairs it with nonhomologous end joining (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-homologous_end_joining>). Due to the nature of the cut, mutations are introduced in the repair process.

It seems in many cases, the mutations introduced are sufficient to disrupt the CCR5 protein and make it non-functional. While it's not as much a "sure thing" as the delta 32 mutation, which introduces a frameshift, it seems relatively effective. They used an adenovirus to introduce their zinc fingers + restriction enzyme, so this has the risks associated with using a virus as a delivery system (ie cancer).

Link to paper: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/3746359/Establishment-of- HIV1-resi...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/3746359/Establishment-of- HIV1-resistance-in-CD4-T-cells-by-genome-editing-using-zincfinger-nucleases-)

</comment><comment><USER3> While this is an interesting technique, I wonder what effects the absence of the cell marker has on normal immune function. As well, gene targeting for therapy is exceptionally tricky; if you miss, you can seriously screw things up.

<comment><USER4> 5% to 14% of European population lacked of CCR-5, while almost none of Asians and Africans lacks CCR-5. A theory about this phenomenon is the black death/smallpox in middle ages in Europe attacked CCR5. And the survivors from several black deaths/smallpox outbreaks were descendants of CCR5 mutation. So theoretically we know how people can live with CCR5 mutation.

Of course, the immune system is complex. So maybe a healthy CCR-5 Delta 32 person needs some other mutations to keep functioning instead of just losing CCR-5.

<comment><USER2> The theory about the black death being the origin isn't correct. While it does provide resistance to the plague, studies have shown that it originated well before that time.

However, people without CCR5 receptors are slightly more susceptible to some diseases, such as West Nile Virus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Immune to all R5 strains of HIV-1, at least... someone with this mutation could still get infected via direct blood transfusion from a late stage AIDS patient.</comment>


The invisible harp. A 3D camera and Python hack - <AUTHOR> http://bharathpatil.com/ <comment><USER2> Super neat but the camera he used to generate the 3D cloud data retails for $700/unit. I imagine you could do something far more cheaply with an old Kinect (which is something they were actively working on at JPL a few years ago, for robot control).

<comment><AUTHOR> True! I just used this because it is easily accessible to me. Anything that provides a point cloud should do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here is the direct link: [http://bharathpatil.com/?p=492](http://bharathpatil.com/?p=492)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A 3D camera transformed into a musical instrument with python+fluidsynth</comment>


Say no to Venn diagrams when explaining SQL joins (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jooq.org/2016/07/05/say-no-to-venn-diagrams-when-explaining-joins/ <comment><USER2> Honestly, if it were not for Venn diagrams, I may have never learned how SQL joins work. It might not be perfect, but if you'd tried to make 16-year-old me understand relational algebra in order to grok how the joins in his Django site were working, he'd have given up before he began.

That's not to say that other ways of illustrating things don't have merit, but broad statements like "say NO to Venn diagrams" just aren't helpful. If people find Venn diagrams a useful tool (and their proliferation indicates they do), I don't see the harm. They didn't stop me going deeper on stuff like relational algebra when I was ready to.

<comment><USER3> The thesis is Say no to Venn diagrams for _Joins_.

The first section is about how Venn works fine for AND and OR because it's set theory and Venn works just fine for examples (maybe not every problem though).

Joins are not sets. They are Cartesian products.

<comment><USER4> I'll be honest: if I didn't know SQL already, I would have no idea what his diagrams are trying to convey...

I do know at this point that he is technically right... But being 100% correct doesn't really matter at the beginning.

And Venn diagrams are right enough to start working with joins

<comment><USER3> That may be a fair critique. Should SQL be successful only to mathematicians and computer scientists? (Who else would even know about set theory or Venn a priori?)

<comment><USER5> In my underfunded rural American elementary school, they taught us Venn diagrams. Not set theory per-se, but they taught us to read and create Venn diagrams.

I don't know if that's representative, but my gut instinct is that Venn diagrams are very accessible to the general public.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is silly. They're a cheatsheet for those who know how SQL joins basically work and what they represent actually makes perfect sense if you don't misrepresent what sets the circles refer to.

Two tables (A & B) are somehow being joined (in the sql sense, by some query) ON a column from each table expressing the same type of id key.

Consider the union of values for those columns in either table. That is the set containing everything in either circle in the Venn diagram. Then consider the values which appear just in A or just in B -- those, respectively are the non-overlapping sides. Then consider the intersection (values which appear as values in both A & B), that is the middle part shared by both circles.

The highlighting on the Venn diagram shows which sets of values for the key could be made to appear in the resulting join for each type of query (and, yes, by extension indicating whether some other non-null data could also be coming from a given table in the cases where the given value is present for the table with the ON'ed column in question)

That's perfectly valid for a Venn diagram. The representation is meaningful and concise.

If you don't understand the fundamental nature of what is happening in a SQL JOIN I can see why you may need a more detailed/verbose diagram for each type of join, but the diagrams don't purport to be about the sets of rows from a table in the result and anyone who grasps the basic principle behind the joins won't struggle with the Venn diagrams because they strike the nail on the head with respect to the differences between each type of join without the need for verbosity & redundancy.

<comment><USER7> Because it's the wrong model.

Take two tables of 1m rows each and do a cross join on them. The Venn diagram model says you would have at most 2m output rows. But that's wrong. You would have 1t rows output. When when you're using a normal join on a specific value matching, if the columns are unsorted, that's 1t comparisons potentially.

The right mental model leads to the right intuition of what's going under the surface. And it's all well and good to say "If you don't understand the fundamental nature of what is happening in a SQL JOIN..." But that is exactly who these diagrams are intended for! People who don't understand yet and are trying to.

Teaching people with the right model means they don't have to unlearn the wrong model later when questions get more complicated.

<comment><USER6> I have yet to see a cross join represented by a Venn diagram, so this strikes me as a red herring on the topic of whether Venn diagrams for the joins that are usually represented with them make sense.

<comment><USER8> The author is arguing for a mental model in which all joins are just cross joins with a filter added, and that Venn Diagrams are a bad representation because they depict set differences, which is not what SQL joins are.

Say tbl_1 has 5 rows, and column "A" is the numbers 1 to 5. Then tbl_2 has the numbers 1 and 2, each repeated 5 times. Now how many rows are in the result of the query below?

        select tbl_1.A from tbl_1 left join tbl_2 using(A)

The fact that the result has 13 rows (more rows than either of the tables!) seems like it would be pretty surprising to someone using the left-join venn diagram as a mental model. The Venn diagram depicts a left-join as a set difference, which it clearly is not.

<comment><USER6> Diagrams and notation serve similar symbolic roles. Just because you can represent a real number, say 5, in a complex number's notation (5 + 0i) and you can't represent a complex number as a real number doesn't mean that you should always use the notation for complex numbers when trying to represent different real numbers. You typically want to use a concise representation that gets the message across without adding extra noise. Things can always be abstracted further into a more generalist, but more verbose representation. Complex numbers can be represented as quarternions, and so on. For the same reason, it makes little sense to use the existence of a JOIN that doesn't use ON (and is frankly not as commonly used) as a reason to complicate the representation of the 7 JOIN queries that do use ON. If translating real numbers into a notation that represents the complex numbers helps you anchor your understanding of complex numbers, great, but I wouldn't buy that our natural representation of real numbers is deficient as a result. I also don't buy that using Venn diagrams to represent JOINs that use ON are "PLAIN WRONG!" because there are things that they can't represent and aren't used to represent.

<comment><USER8> The fact that I don't use "on" is just syntax, it doesn't change the query. The following query is equivalent.

        select tbl_1.A
        from tbl_1
        left join tbl_2
          on tbl_1.A = tbl_2.A

I don't think this is a special complex example. It's about as simple as you can get.

<comment><USER6> This was incorrect:"The Venn diagram depicts a left-join as a set difference, which it clearly is not."

It is in fact a set difference and the sets in question are values for the column being ONed on in each table (as I explained in the top level comment)

My reply was with respect to these being cross joins with filters. That's just one way of thinking about a JOIN that actually adds notational complexity (and does not actually represent how your database would be doing the join because it would be unnecessarily expensive computationally). Thinking of it in terms of a set difference of the values in thr ON column is arguably the better way of thinking of it if you are interested in how such a join should be implemented. Alternatively you can interpret the venn diagrams as just the filtration if you prefer interpreting as a cross join with filters.

<comment><USER8> f you have one set with 5 elements and another with 10, the set difference cannot have 13 elements.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-

In anticipation of some possible technical replies, let me be more explicit:

It isn't a set difference, no matter how you view it.

Viewpoint 1: The original lists of objects are not actually sets because the elements are not distinct. From this viewpoint, it isn't a set difference because they aren't even sets to begin with.

Viewpoint 2: There is an implicit "row number" feature of each object so in that sense the objects are distinct and do form sets. From this viewpoint, it still isn't a set difference. If you have one set with 5 elements and another with 10, the set difference cannot have 13 elements.

</comment><comment><USER9> I love this premise! I have always hated the venn diagram approach. When I started programming, I never found them useful. I agree it is the wrong model to teach what is happening with joins. It think it produces more confusion.

The author's approach is a better visual model. Using boxes makes so much more sense, since we are dealing with rows of data. The circles of a venn diagram don't represent a result set visually, and i think that's why I always found it confusing.

The the main point I think should be expressed to really explain what's happening in a join is about null values. If one table has nulls in the matching set, which ones do we want to keep, or discard? The box approach shows this beautifully, while a venn approach doesn't really make this obvious.

The best visual representation I've ever seen is similar to the author's, but animated. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983007](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983007)

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember being a third year CS student, studying for some database exam coming up, and a friend of mine (a wickedly smart second year student) explained joins as Cartesian products to me. Took her all of 60 second to turn my entire brain over. Blew my mind.

I had been _using_ SQL but not _understanding_ it. Mostly because of poor previous explanation via things like Venn diagrams- the wrong model lead me to think incorrectly and make mistakes.

With the right model in my head, the exam was dead easy. I don't even know that she realized how impactful that was to me. So on the off chance you're reading HN, thanks Wen!

<comment><USER10> So in a sense she drew a Wen diagram?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really don't see the point here.

If I turn the "correct" diagrams sideways, it looks very much like a venn diagram again.

<comment><USER6> Yep: [https://i.imgur.com/cgYkQbS.png](https://i.imgur.com/cgYkQbS.png)

I'm drawing the conclusion that some people just need to see arbitrary concrete values to be able to understand what's going on.

<comment><USER12> This image isn't opening on my end. Can you please share in another format. You can use [https://www.coolutils.com/TotalImageConverter](https://www.coolutils.com/TotalImageConverter)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here's the key point I think the article misses: Very nearly always (I mean really really nearly always), when you do a left/right/inner join, the condition you use for the join is a unique (usally primary) key on one side and a foreign key on the other side. So although in theory you start with the full cartesian join and then filter some of the results out (picking out of n×m entries), in practice you are only left with at most max(n,m) entries. So something like a Venn diagram is much less wrong than it is for the outer join (but still a _bit_ wrong).

What I would like to see is inner/left/right joins explained with colours used to indicate value (as the article already does) but in the form of entries in a PivotTable (as the article used only for outer join), perhaps with faded entries for those that were filtered out. Most of all, it would be great to see this with non-unique values in _both_ tables, as rare as this admittedly is. This could be followed up by the more usual primary key / foreign key combination. At that point it would be visually clear that only max(n,m) entries are left, so you could finish up by showing those evil Venn diagrams after all, with the disclaimer that you understand that there's a full n×m combination under the hood in theory.

</comment><comment><USER14> I once interviewed a QA person for a very heavy data centric project.

He didn't know SQL well, but he described a left join problem perfectly by drawing a Venn diagram to explain the data that needed to be retrieved. When I was about to finish up the interview, he was so curious about the answer he insisted that I explained the answer so "he could sleep at night".

I gave him a thumbs up just because he knew the concept and displayed intellectual curiosity. It was a great choice.

</comment><comment><USER15> Since _by far_ the most errors I see in SQL queries are places where Venn diagrams do not accurately describe SQL behavior... yeah, I'm gonna have to agree, though I'm not sold on the alternative here. Like 90%+ of the flaws I run across in queries are due to multiple matching rows on the right side, without `distinct` or an aggregation of some kind.

1:1 matches on rows are trivial. Venn diagrams can describe these too. But you really can't let people develop an intuition based on that, early on, or they kinda get stuck and it takes a while to unravel.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think being overly concerned with an accurate representation of a concept is less important than conveying information.

A Venn diagram may not be a perfect analog for joins but they relay the concept quite well.

<comment><USER17> I don't think that is true. If you base your understanding on an inaccurate representation, then you may later on run into problems trying to fit new information into your inaccurate thought-model. For example explaining electric circuits with water analogies (like described here: [https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/voltage-current- resista...](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/voltage-current-resistance- and-ohms-law/voltage)) cannot account for EMF.

<comment><USER18> Every model or analogy has this problem, but it doesn't make models and analogies useless for learning.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. Abstractions are lossy. The goal here is comprehension, I don't see how the models here differ in that regard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really well done, but I agree with one of the comments in there: need to add patterns to the solid colors; it would differentiate for color blind folks and in general make the relationships easier to grasp.

<comment><USER20> I tried pasting the cross join and inner join into a colorblindness simulator [1] and the only issue I found is that the A and the 2 in the cross join look similar if you have monochromacy. Looking at the monochromatic version, I don't think this really affects the clarity of the cross join diagram.

The inner join is already perfectly distinguishable by how dark the squares are, and anything other than monochromacy preserves the distinctions that the color adds in the cross join, unless the site I used is misleading.

[1] [https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness- simul...](https://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/)

</comment></comment><comment> your-nanny I have always found the use of Venn Diagrams for this purpose utterely confusing, and even wrong headed. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER21> Many ways to skin a cat...

SQL used to have an intriguing aura of exotic knowledge back in time when SQL was still a Language to highlight on a resume and to have an RDBMS server meant spending thousands.

So Venn diagrams were just adding to such aura. But it's a visual aid and is usually supplemented with examples. If it doesn't ring a bell, some hands-on or detailed explanation helps crack it.

Personally, I believe JOIN should first be touched upon when introducing normalization. It just makes sense: break tables apart then join them together. Here one could also grasp a utility of an index on join column.

Then progress to more advanced use of joins - outer join (needs a concept of NULL), union (basically a synthetic set) etc.

Finally, a cross join - as one of those cases that may lock your terminal if you don't know what you're doing. Of course learning Cartesian product concept here, if not yet.

As anything in Computer, the hands-on aspect usually clears thing much better then science-first. The science would ease in much better once the utility is grasped.

Teaching means helping someone to learn, not making them understand your way of teaching. So different aids may work for different audiences.

</comment><comment><USER22> Either the author is not proposing an alternative, or the alternative is formulae and poorly formatted screenshots, or my ublock origin settings are blocking the perfect method to explain SQL joins in 100x100 pixels.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why does SQL have both WHERE and ON, plus various kinds of JOINs? It seems to me that it would be simpler to have just have one JOIN which represents the Cartesian product, plus WHERE for filtering - and then the DB engine could apply optimizations so that queries would actually run as fast as in existing SQL. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER24> The bit your missing is the awkwardness of expressing outer joins. The way Oracle does it is an existence proof of its awkwardness.

The 'FROM' clause defaults to Cartesian product for multiple tables. You can then specify your join conditions in the where clause, but it makes outer joins harder to write - Oracle does them with special (+) operator, but it's clumsy.

It doesn't (shouldn't) make much difference at all to the database whether you specify your join condition after the `ON` or in the `WHERE` - if it doesn't hoist `WHERE` conditions into the join clause, and potentially change the join order because of it, it's missing big optimization opportunities.

<comment><USER25> Can you expand on how oracle does it?

I can't imagine any reasonable way to do outer joins in a where clause.

For inner joins the grandparent is correct and it should never matter whether you use ON or a where clause.

<comment><USER24> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22678643/old-style- oracl...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22678643/old-style-oracle-outer- join-syntax-why-locate-the-on-the-right-side-of-the)

Of course it's weird and ugly. I don't think there's anything to recommend it over ANSI join syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thanks for the link, it is so true, well done!

</comment><comment><USER27> A lot of people are saying hang on, they're useful for explaining. But my experience when teaching relational databases is that they give the _illusion_ of understanding. I'd rather have the students know that they do not know (and work harder) than look at a Venn diagram, think they get it, and move on.

</comment><comment><USER28> What a silly little article. Venn diagrams are an extremely illustrative and useful way to visualize joins.

</comment><comment><USER29> This makes me glad I learned SQL first with relational algebra. Probably that wouldn't work for a lot of people, but as a math major it made the basic concepts pretty clear.

</comment><comment><USER30> Lol I used Venn diagrams to explain joins just a week or two ago. It does the trick but doesn't account for many to one joins

</comment><comment><USER31> "A JOIN is really a cartesian product (also cross product) with a filter." It always boils down to this for me.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have always been wondering why Venn diagrams are used for illustrating joins...

<comment><USER33> Seemed like a good idea. It certainly helped me to get inti the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > _Honestly, if it were not for Venn diagrams, I may have never learned how > SQL joins work. It might not be perfect, but if you 'd tried to make > 16-year-old me understand relational algebra in order to grok how the joins > in his Django site were working, he'd have given up before he began._

The whole point of the article is that there are different visualizations that are much better than Venn diagrams (in fact Venn diagrams are totally misleading), and they don't require any relational algebra.

That said, if someone doesn't know what a cartesian product is (high school level math), perhaps they shouldn't be allowed near a database...

<comment><USER2> >if someone doesn't know what a cartesian product is (high school level math), perhaps they shouldn't be allowed near a database...

This is such an intellectually snobbish position to take. I can tell you that I didn't know this term when I first interacted with a database, and if someone had told me the above, I would have just felt stupid and given up.

The fact you learned what a Cartesian product was at high school shouldn't preclude someone who hasn't from trying to build stuff and experiment with tech. Not everyone learns things the same way, or in the same order, and that's okay.

<comment><USER34> > _This is such an intellectually snobbish position to take._

Intellectually snobbish is "everyone should listen to Mahler and read Epictetus in the original language".

This is just basic professional requirement...

> _The fact you learned what a Cartesian product was at high school shouldn't > preclude someone who hasn't from trying to build stuff and experiment with > tech._

Just not in any capacity where people depend on their output...

<comment><USER35> You didn't say "should not be allowed near a production database" you said "database"

That is very different. This was a 16 year old kid trying to mess around and learn stuff, he should be able to be around databases all he wants. I wouldn't hire him as a DBA, but he should be able to learn without having to wait for more advanced math.

<comment><USER34> > _You didn 't say "should not be allowed near a production database" you said > "database". That is very different._

And that's what I meantt, so since you agree that's "that's very different", we're on the same page.

> _a 16 year old kid trying to mess around and learn stuff, he should be able > to be around databases all he wants_

Well, it's not like a comment on HN is going to stop them.

<comment><USER35> Well, you were replying to someone who said they learned SQL for their Django site when they were 16, and you admonished them for not knowing Cartesian products and using a database... so it was certainly not clear that you meant a production database.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier? - <AUTHOR> Where things = products, services, tools, strategies, books, systems, etc.<p>For me:<p>* Internal Family Systems made me more peaceful<p>* "The Sleep Book" by Meadows made me sleep better<p>* Apps: Otter for taking notes, Superhuman for email<p>* Websites: Wirecutter<p>* Books: How to Get Lucky, Self-Therapy <comment><USER3> I've spent a ton of time as a developer trying to make money from various side projects and businesses. So most of my top "wish I'd discovered this earlier" list revolves around tech+business stuff:

* Strategy #1: Charge more. patio11 has been shouting this from the rooftops for years, but it didn't sink in until after I started Indie Hackers[0]. If you charge something like $300/customer instead of $5/customer, you can get to profitability with something like 50 phone calls rather than years of slogging. It's still hard, but it's way faster.

* Strategy #2: Brian Balfour's four fits model[1]. It's not enough to think about the product. You also need to think about the market, distribution channels, and pricing, and how each of these four things fit together. I imagine them as four wheels on a car. It's better to have 4 mediocre wheels than 3 great ones and a flat.

* Book: _The Mom Test._ [2] Amazing book about how to talk to customers to research your ideas without being misled, which is a step I've stumbled on before.

* Tool: Notion. I just discovered it recently. I use it for all my docs and planning.

[0] [https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com) \- my latest business, and the one that actually worked

[1] [https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth- framework](https://brianbalfour.com/four-fits-growth-framework)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business- everyone/...](https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business- everyone/dp/1492180742)

<comment><USER4> how does one find business ideas that you can charge 300/customer? is it 300 per month or per year?

<comment><USER3> I'd err closer to $300/month.

How do you find ideas in this category? Simple: Just look at what people are already paying lots of money for.

Off the top of my head, consumers spend lots of money on education (courses, seminars, books, classes, workshops), events and experiences, travel and vehicles, rent and housing, clothing and accessories, food, hobbies, etc. Businesses spend lots of money on recruiting and hiring, hosting, advertising, marketing tools, analytics tools, productivity, real estate, etc.

I know tons of indie hackers building businesses that help others learn to code, for example.

<comment><USER5> Off the top of your head what are some of the more successful 'learn to code' indiehacks?

<comment><USER3> Wes Bos, Adam Wathan, Joel Hooks of Egghead, Quincy Larson of freeCodeCamp, Jeff Meyerson of Software Engineering Daily, Ben Halpern of DEV, Jessica Chan of Coder Coder, arguably Ben Tossell of Makerpad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Learning How To Learn_ ([https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to- learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)) and Barbara Oakley's book _A Mind For Numbers_. Completely changed my approach to studying and learning, and my academic efforts after taking it were tremendously better than before.

Also related: highly recommend Anki. It feels like magic when the spaced repetition works!

<comment><USER7> Is it necessary to go through the entire Learning How to Learn course or is there a TL;DR somewhere?

<comment><USER8> I don't remember who posted it or if it's the same course, but [https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj](https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj)

<comment><USER9> Whoa cool these are the notes I put together. I'm glad someone remembered :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _You are the sum of your habits_. I've always had "sort-of passable" ones, but they were never chosen by design, only by what had accreted with time. I had played with some systems and apps, but nothing had really worked until I took the time to write out in excrutiating detail what I would be doing for every minute of my morning and evening. At first I had to follow my schedule, but that didn't last long.

With the birth of my son, daycare, and a new job, I was finally forced to actually plan out a morning and evening routine. I wish I had done this in university.

Every day for the last 6 months, I have now a routine I don't have to think twice about:

* Woke up at 5 AM,

* Exercise hard, take a shower and have breakfast,

* Get to work before 7:30 AM with my day's tasks already in mind.

Similar for the evening preparing my breakfast, lunch and clothes. It's liberating to do these now without thinking. It took about a month, and my brain is now free to plan out the day or listen to an audiobook.

<comment><USER11> How do you get to work before 7:30am with a child? Does daycare start that early?

I struggle to get my kids up, fed, clothed and in kidnergarten before 8:30 myself (which means I can be at work around 9).

<comment><USER10> My wife and I's schedules are staggered. She takes mornings, I take the afternoons.

I don't think the actual hours at which you start your day matter much, though. I find the value is in being constant at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice job on Internal family systems OP! I'm not there quite yet but getting close

\- TypeScript : Absolute game changer for JS. I can't imagine programming regular ES. Sort of hoping TypeScript becomes the next ES.

\- Desktops : Desktop processors and video cards are insanely powerful compared to laptops. If you're doing any sort of compilation (even if it's webpack / frontend) this stuff helps a ton. A project that takes 90s to build on a mbp is 30s on a desktop.

\- Windows 10 + WSL

\- Attachment Theory: [https://www.behaviorology.org/oldsite/pdf/AttachmentTheoryBe...](https://www.behaviorology.org/oldsite/pdf/AttachmentTheoryBeh.pdf), [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d36/ac75d7081fcd86d467f6d2...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1d36/ac75d7081fcd86d467f6d2ef408d60c8ffca.pdf) (The stuff by Cindy Hazan and Philip Shaver are very relevant for adults)

\- Schema Therapy: [https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf](https://www.guilford.com/excerpts/young.pdf)

Look up Psychology in Seattle on Patreon and download the deep dives for Attachment Theory and Schema Therapy. After that it's easier to grok the research papers/books.

<comment><USER13> Do you mind sharing briefly what you got out of attachment theory and schema therapy? Or why are they worth a look?

<comment><USER12> To some, they're therapy frameworks, to other's they're analytical tools. I bring it up here is because they cut to the chase and get to what people want. We're not good at saying it, it makes us too vulnerable to. Some of us could save a lot of time and misery if we broke this taboo.

Are you to open to viewing things in a different perspective? First you'd get a gist of the theory/framework/model/whatever. Then you'd need to understand what thing/person/system it's being used on. Without that, it'd be making too many assumptions to explain to others without context. The perspective is subjective to the one applying it, a blend of art and science.

I grew up in a family / circle where as an adolescent, nobody gave me advice or cared about my emotions. Worse, my parents dumped their emotions on me. Despite being a child and having my own stuff on my plate, I was recipient to persistent, intense emotional outpourings of neediness, anxiety and anger. Day in and out, for years. I looked up papers as a survival tool. Various other stuff that messed up me having needs met.

What do people need anyway? Does everybody have them? Do people need to be loved, how is it defined? Does society ignore, shame, or belittle our basic needs?

Sometimes, I think so. This means people are suffering and they can't even articulate why.

What if more people could simply be cognizant of these needs? Could/would we be happier? I don't know. I'm still digging into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thinking strategically from a career and life perspective.

Managing your investments

Eating right and exercise

Risk Taking - take big risks early in your life, ones which have the biggest upside. The terror of the unknown and leaping into it and coming out at the other end multiple times makes you fearless. The journey is all that matters, the destination is not in your hand. But the journey teaches a lot.

Some of the above, I was fortunate to learn early on from good mentors, and I've reaped big rewards, the rest I only wish someone had told me earlier.

<comment><USER15> I wish I'd learnt about investing before I was in my late 30s - and same about value of a good pension. Still - it is never too late.

<comment><USER16> What exactly do you mean by "investing". The notion of "investing" in a few index funds or shoveling money to a financial advisor?

<comment><USER15> Just the concept of sticking £100/£1000 here and there into a an index tracker and leaving it well alone - ideally until a rainy day/emergency.

There have been plenty of times in my life I was 'cash rich' but I left my money in the bank, as I didn't know what to do with it. I used to then over pay my mortgage, which was crazy as I had a 1% interest rate and the stock market would have been a better place to put my cash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a 'rich' man - but I've always put money aside (out of a fear/memory of being broke) I just could have worked that cash harder - and that was money that I could have taken some risk with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wish i had learned that going to the gym is the thing to do when your brain is full.

My undergrad GPA would've been higher and i'd have gotten fit earlier in life.

<comment><USER18> I especially like the exact moment during the workout when you feel that "blood starts flowing in the head again" and you gain some sort of clarity. Especially if I've been working really hard that day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wish I had discovered Hacker News earlier.

I kept having customers sign up for rsync.net citing "Hacker News" in the "where you found out about us" but I assumed it was the _old hacker news_ that was run by a certain defcon/cdc personality and was sort of a clone of attrition.org ... it had been around since 99/00/01 or so ...

It took me several years to figure out there was a _new_ hacker news out there ...

<comment><USER20> I believe that one was the hacker news network (hnn) IIRC

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Realizing how much incentives matter. Everything around you is driven by incentives: Coworkers, your boss, customers, personal relationships. More importantly, everything is driven by "personal incentives" more so than "business incentives", and those two aren't usually aligned. For example, if you are talking to a potential customer (who may represent a company), it's invaluable to understand what incentives drive this person (not company!). What is he or she trying to get out of working with you? A promotion? Recognition from his boss? A story to tell his family at dinner? What are his current life and career goals and how does that align with choosing you? What is his decision making progress and why? And so on. The same can be applied to your coworkers, or anyone else you're working with. Even to you friends and family, whose incentives may to be simply have a good time, feel loved and accepted, or have someone to listen.

There are rarely true "irrational" decisions. If a decision looks irrational to you, it's most likely because you don't truly understand the incentives driving that person.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you're interested in seeing financial returns for your time/work, don't work as a startup employee, ever.

<comment><USER9> Could you elaborate? Seems like this is heavily dependent on the success of the startup and at which stage you joined.

<comment><USER23> The probability for this is extremely low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish I had discovered the wonders of attending college earlier on. I spent a good chunk of my teens and twenties in a constant state of alienation because I wasn't around people who put much value towards analytical thought. It wasn't until when I finally discovered it on my own in my mid-20s that life started making sense. It seems like that for many, the high school -> university pipeline is the path of least resistance, but if you don't have any pressure from family or direct peers involved in that kind of thing, it can fall far under the radar.

</comment><comment><USER25> #1 How to run. I hated and avoided running for 30 years, then I got to the point where I hated going to a club and I hated having a machine in my home (and not getting any aerobic exercise at all was of course intolerable) so I decided to give running a try. At first it sucked, but then I figured out I'd been doing it wrong so I fixed my stride etc. It sucked less. I still don't enjoy the activity itself, but I'm sure glad for the results.

#2 The power of compound interest. I was lucky to learn this one early, but I think a lot of others weren't so lucky. More than any other single thing, any skill, any stroke of luck, this is why I now feel comfortable about my financial future into retirement.

<comment><USER26> > I still don't enjoy the activity itself, but I'm sure glad for the results.

I don't think that's a sustainable or worthwhile approach. Exercise and training can be found in many forms and countless different activities - <USER2> those you actually enjoy.

<comment><USER25> > I don't think that's a sustainable or worthwhile approach.

I have several thousand miles of evidence to the contrary. There's a lot of "exercise" not worthy of the name. For many people, especially at my age, the very heart/lung exertion that characterizes true exercise is at least mildly unpleasant regardless of how it's attained. Fortunately, one can harness competitive or goal-oriented impulses to make up for it. I count miles, I track my pace, I compare myself to other runners my age, I look at the scale, etc. Thinking about these results helps me keep going when I exercise just like it does when I'm hacking on some grotty piece of code at work, and I've been doing that continuously for longer than most here have been alive.

If I only ever did things that were fun in the moment, I'd be a bit of a failure, so I suppose learning the value of deferred gratification is another potential answer to the original question.

<comment><USER26> That's fine. I didn't mean to say that you only should do fun things, but I think there's a middleground. Personally, I think running is a very boring activity - road biking however, while similar in nature, is something I look forward to and it comes with the same benefits (goals, tracking, comparable stats) you seem to actually enjoy.

I can also recommend team sports - for me it's football (as in soccer), but specific sports are beside the point as those are very subjective. I'm just trying to say that I see no point in engaging in a sport I don't enjoy when there are so many options available that offer rewarding goals _and_ provide enjoyment while you get there.

<comment><USER25> Anything that requires a specific time and place to do it with others is a non-starter for me as a primary form of exercise.

If I lived near a body of water, kayaking would be a good alternative in summer (or more if I move to a different part of the country). That could still happen some day, but not now. Cross-country skiing is an alternative, and one I intend to pursue more this winter since I now live near some good places for it, but of course that's only in winter.

Cycling is the kind of obvious alternative, but I'm not really sure I'd enjoy it any more at the same intensity. As I said, it's the intensity itself that creates discomfort, and I've seen too much mayhem involving intense cyclists too. Seems like that focus on results can have pretty serious consequences at bike speeds.

It's great that you feel like you have tons of options that both meet your goals and provide enjoyment at the time. Consider that it might not be the case for everyone, and some might still put the goals first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Meditation. Download a free 20-minute guided meditation and do it every day. Maybe at some point read "The Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I can provide a good guided breathing meditation on request.

Meditation will help you be calm and focused. It will help you recognize and work through emotions with a minimum of harm to yourself or others.

I'm definitely not advocating self-immolation, but the same training that let monks sit calmly as they burned to death in the 60s (in an attempt to call attention to the horrifying war in Vietnam) will definitely help you deal with your breakup, illness, work troubles, or loss of a loved one.

<comment><USER28> I'd appreciate a link to a good guided breathing meditation

<comment><USER29> I'm not sure which type of phone you use, but I've been meditating off and on for years, and I've tried EVERYTHING. The absolute best guided meditations are from an app called "Stop Breathe & Think" - It gives you a 2 question survey and gives you a guided meditation based on what you need for the day. A lot of meditation apps feel very corporate and contrived, but not this one.

Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stopbreath...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.stopbreathethink.app&hl=en_US)

iOS: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stop-breathe- think/id778848692](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stop-breathe- think/id778848692)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> How to effectively learn and balance my use of mental energy.

My diagnosis of depression and ADD inattentive-type (my parents were great, but denied that mental health was a factor until I decided to at age 22). I don't fault them, but I know for a fact my years in highschool and college struggling to learn / focus but knowing I had cognitive ability will irk me until the day that I die.

<comment><USER30> Was going to respond with this as well. At 27 I decided to reflect on my abilities vs test scores and ability to focus and spoke to a doctor. Parents never considered mental health as a factor, and looking back—but without blame—opportunies and growth were missed. Care to expand on your case?

Edit: Saw your response below.

<comment><USER16> Glad to hear I'm not alone with my later-ish diagnosis.

Like you, I don't blame my parents. But I do wonder what I would've been able to accomplish academically when I was in high school and a majority of college if I'd had my diagnosis. Many of my friends in college (both ADD and non-ADD) assumed I had a diagnosis and was just distracted by personal projects to perform academically.

How'd you make up for lost time / improve your work habits after your diagnosis?

<comment><USER30> Well, I don't technically have a diagnosis—I don't think. I have been prescribed some medication that I think helps most of the time, as long as I can get started. 27mg Concerta up from 18mg. It's a subtle effect and I don't take it every day. To re-up this prescription, I'm counting on a walk-in clinic being able to do so by using my existing bottle. Aside from that, I'm also only maybe 3 or 4 months in to using it. What I found to be helpful in terms of study habits—I've been meandering through a degree for about 5 or 6 years—is taking physical notes frequently, for anything I do. Over the last few years it seems as though my working memory has deteriorated severely. This could be a result of a concussion or almost anything, but I've been taking B12 and it's improved a bit. Otherwise, I've reflected a lot over the last 3 years on the things I do and how I do them. In short, one thing I need to enforce in myself is only investing myself personally in stuff I can feel is worthwhile and creates value or is otherwise interesting. I can't work a corporate job for long, I'll get fired and become depressed. I do best with disparate, hard, and novel tasks that don't require me to be anywhere for any particular time. That isn't always sustainable though, so I've started grading my days to hold myself accountable towards tasks I don't want to do, so I can get better at that. That's in short. I've been fired or laid off from 6 or 7 jobs, but can think through complex reasoning tasks pretty well and easily fixate on tough theoretical problems that are approachable for my background. I'm extremely ambitious and aim for hard stuff, so I'd like to find a way to leverage that more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How much playing Bach would improve my piano ability as a function of time spent. Some HN comment recently mentioned this, so I gave it a try.

The importance of keeping a clean sleeping environment.

</comment><comment><USER32> * Bouldering: Could be generalized as "a sport that fits you". Bouldering changed my life, as it is the perfect balance to a desk job. I met a lot of great people, improved my self confidence and am much healthier now.

* The power of routine: I never liked routine and thought it stifles creativity. In some ways it actually might, but creaitivity without productivity isn't worth that much.

* To not take myself so seriously: Life is so much easier and more fun if you can laugh about yourself, if you don't try to uphold a self-imposed picture towards others, and if you can accept that sometimes things go wrong, and sometimes it's your fault. - Not only am I happier now, I think it also made me a better person.

</comment><comment><USER33> Hard Sci-fi.

Holy crap it just overdelivers. In addition to entertainment, a way to take my mind off things, it also delivers context to daily life and keeps me focussed on trying to deliver something truly worthwhile.

<comment><USER34> Any recommendations? I've read a ton of Arthur C. Clarke in my teens, I'd love to branch out.

<comment><USER35> Andy Weir - _The Martian_. Possibly the most well researched science fiction book I've ever read. Well worth reading even if you've seen the movie, since that leaves out about half the things that go wrong and the large majority of the technical details.

Andy Weir - _Artemis_. Weir managed to figure out a way for a city on the moon to make economic sense, while physics makes it almost impossible.

Neal Stephenson - _Seveneves_. First sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." What follows is the brutally, unforgivingly hard consequences.

<comment><USER36> Seveneves is great as are Snow Crash and Anathem by the same author. Anathem has a lovely epic feel. Tough read though!

<comment><USER35> I haven't read Anathem yet. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age are also excellent, but getting away from hard sci fi.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I dearly wish I had used something like Anki throughout college instead of many years later. And actually focusing on understanding and long term recall rather than passing tests. It would have been difficult though, since having multiple difficult classes simultaneously often requires cramming at the end followed by focusing on the next course. But if I went back to school now that's what I would have done.

<comment><USER38> I've used Anki to learn foreign languages and it has been amazing so I tried to use it in grad school but it backfired because all my courses expected understanding a few big deep ideas and not memorization of hundreds of small facts. I think it really depends on the domain, like medschool its commonly used but I'm not sure about other areas.

<comment><USER37> Do you have any examples? I'm genuinely curious. I'm using it for languages but also math etc. I've found that medium/big picture ideas come with some kind of "insight" that has to fit into short term memory, or consciousness, so it must be possible to construct some cue that reminds me of this insight. I've also learned over time that even though it feels like I could never forget an insight I just had, over time they fade as well unless I revisit them.

<comment><USER38> Examples of where I dont find srs productive- law and programming. Both are focused on deep ideas that do not convert easily to a short sentence and by the time you've gotten the idea the verbal reminder is not necessary. I know what you mean about an insight but for me when I really get something, for example an algorithm its more like a mental picture of moving parts in my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> That cheap mice and keyboards will ruin ones hands beyond repair after years of heavy use.

Don't be that person. Learn to type and invest in your hardware early on.

<comment><USER40> Do you have specific suggestions re: peripherals. I've been using the Logitech MX Vertical Wireless lately and it's been a huge improvement from my previous bulky Logitech G600.

I'm wondering if there are keyboard set-ups people really like? I'm enjoying my Gigabyte mechanical keyboard, but would be willing to give it up for something that'll let me get more mileage out of my hands/arms.

<comment><USER41> I really like the MS Sculpt keyboard. I use it with a Mac, my wife uses hers with her Windows machine.

I also recently learned about proper desk posture - I now sit with my stomach just touching the desk, and my keyboard is way further forward. My forearms rest on the desk almost all the way to my elbows, and my wrists rest on the keyboards wrist pads. I find that this greatly reduces the strain on my arms and wrists.

<comment><USER42> Although it looks terrible tables with that little arch cutout are pretty smart for this reason. Especially on standing desk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> No amount of telling yourself you're happy will make you happy. You can't just "make yourself happy", it's a side effect of other things you do in your life.

<comment><USER44> Yup. There was a recent guest on Tim Ferriss podcast - he was talking about depressed people, no amount of "you should be happy" or "there are people who have it much worse than you" is gonna help depressed people. It is only going to annoy them and drive them away.

That said, there _are_ people who use affirmations successfully to get out their misery. I dunno what to believe anymore

<comment><USER33> I run a checklist in my head whenever im feeling really down. I think about things I know make me really happy, basic things. Friends, family, travel, motorbikes etc. And if when thinking about those I _still_ feel down and pessimistic - I understand that it's my brain chemicals at play and Im in a funk.

Doesn't help me feel better in that particular moment, but does let me know that later it will get better and there some context and comfort in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> • Bread freezes and thaws really well, with little or no loss of texture and flavor. If I had found this out 35 years earlier, I probably would have replaced thousands of visits to fast food restaurants with sandwiches made at home.

<comment><USER13> What kind of bread? Homemade? Store-bought? Sandwich bread? Whole wheat? White? Does it matter?

Also, how do you thaw it?

<comment><USER46> Not op, but we've frozen pretty much all bread for years. You don't get the freshly baked feeling, but unless you live on top of a bakery you aren't going to get that anyway. Defrost either leave it out or microwave. Alternatively if making sandwiches for work, make them frozen and let it defrost during the morning.

<comment><USER47> Alternatively, slice it before freezing, and chuck it in the toaster to defrost.

<comment> blaser-waffle This works really well, but with one caveat: you're not gonna store it for a really long time. Otherwise you get a lot of freezer burn between each slice, way more than on an uncut loaf.

But like a month or two in the chiller? All good. Had great results with homemade pain de mie that was sliced and frozen and eaten over 30 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Sleep

Get good sleep. At least 8 hours everyday. Get a good mattress.

A good sleep makes a happy life.

<comment><USER49> Also seek consult from a Sleep Laboratory at ypur local major hospital, if you snore people and people sleeping in the same room report you stop breathing during your sleep (even for a few seconds).

This might be signs of treatable pathological conditions that if not treated can (and most likely will be) detrimental to your health, quality of life and productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Probably Karabiner. This tool is just crazy powerful.

[https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...](https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karabiner/karabiner.edn)

</comment><comment><USER34> Parsers / Lexers. I've been programming for twenty-ish years and only recently started playing with parsers and even a simple hand written one is quite empowering. I really wish I could have spent more time on this when I was younger and single. I for instance wrote a small not-fully-featured SQL parser [0] recently which helped me overcome a huge obstacle in my job.

[0]: [https://github.com/donatj/sqlread](https://github.com/donatj/sqlread)

</comment><comment><USER51> Therapy and having a spiritual Father. Then I would have discovered all the dumb things I did as a teenager and early 20s were as a result of a destructive feedback cycle consisting of depression/anxiety, low self esteem, and existential crisis.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wish I'd really discovered programming before I did. Though, I'd been reading about it, messing with Excel, WP blogs and nibbling at the edges for my entire adult life, it wasn't until my mid 30s that I really got into programming.

It wasn't an easy mid-career move, but it's _greatly_ improved my life options and can only imagine where I'd be now if I'd spent my 20s learning computer languages instead of human ones.

</comment><comment><USER53> Be kind to yourself, if you can't you can't be kind to others.

</comment><comment><USER54> Awareness that periods of high performance are not 'free'. How to leverage that balance.

Curiosity and aptitude for math. I've found this about 25 years too late for it to make much of a difference.

<comment><USER55> Can you elaborate more on the first sentence?

<comment><USER54> Sure, an understanding that I have a closed, fixed pool of resources to balance between efforts.

My personal model is mind / body / spirit (or mental / physical / artistic). I've learned through failure that high and exceptional performance in one direction draws fuel from the other(s).

If my performance is out of balance for a long enough period, I seem to accrue a kind of debt repaid over periods of burnout and depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This might sound simple, but in my mid 20s I discovered how effective I was at teaching myself new things..in the past I had relied on learning within the confines school. I just found it odd that I discovered I didn't need teachers to learn conventional subjects after I was already done with university.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wish I had discovered interval training and olympic lifting earlier.

<comment><USER58> Crossfit?

<comment><USER57> That works, as long as you have a decent coach good with body mechanics. Kinda few and far between in my experience. But in general, lifting heavy things is healthy and I wish I had been doing it sooner. For cardio, intervals ftw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The absurdity of taking student loans for education

<comment><USER60> This is highly location dependent though. I just happened to notice that the interest on my Swedish student loan is _0.16%_. That in combination with the income-indexed payback scheme and the fact that the loan balance is forgiven at age 65 makes it an absurdly good deal.

<comment><USER61> Swedish higher education is generally free, or at least very cheap.

If you insist you can find places that are not free, but generally loans are taken to finance housing and living

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> 1\. That sleeping over uncomfortable pending decisions and discussions helps a lot.

2\. That a fixed sleeping schedule with at least 8 hours of sleep does wonders to my thought process and has a calming effect.

3\. That my thoughts, especially under tough circumstances, are not really a true picture of reality. This one is tough and is still under discovery mode.

4\. That I should never compare myself with others. The only thing I should rely on others should be for inspiration. The comparison part I knew my whole life but, like all simple things, it took a while for me to actually immerse in the depth of it.

</comment><comment><USER63> Functional Programming, so much of my frustration with mathematics early in my education could have been allayed if just a small number of certain core ideas were planted in my head when going through it.

</comment><comment><USER64> Explosive outbursts of anger over tiny tiny issues is a mental illness and not a normal part of life.

Probably not what OP was specifically looking for, but this single discovery has been the most profound in my life.

</comment><comment><USER65> Here's a couple for web dev:

* how DNS works and how to configure common record types

* regular expressions - specifically for URL rewriting

* setting up good logging and monitoring

* asking for help earlier

<comment><USER66> When you think about scaling your service or application, don't forget about how your logs will grow. Think about this impact on CPU and disk usage. If you wrote your own agent to ingest your logs, don't forget to scale up your logging service.

Source: peak traffic event... person who did back of the envelope math based on p99 request size forgot about logs and specifically the increased log event volume.

Machines were about to tip over. I recall having to ssh to hosts to manually kill the log agent process because the logging ingestion service was shitting itself (not properly throttling either) and we had no other levers in place. Lolz did I mention deleting logs on live hosts because logs were just accumulating and not getting cleared off? Now imagine this across 20,000 hosts. Teehee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> -Having a morning routine

-Meditation

-Reading consistently

-Importance of sleep (fixed my sleeping issues with CBT-I [cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia])

-Value of joining a leadership/self development group like Toastmasters

-Accepting you for who you are, and work with your strengths

-Stop listening to what people say/advice about your life, most of the time they're wrong and you know better.

<comment><USER61> > -Stop listening to what people say/advice about your life, most of the time > they're wrong and you know better.

Yes, it will also reduce your stress levels. But it's easier said then done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Discovering Hn, about 4 years ago. Although I did not choose which cs subfield to master yet, I think Hn will affect my decision heavily. But I wish I had taken a year break after graduating high school to know better about myself, so I could have chosen cs instead of eee.

<comment><USER69> Unsolicited cents of advice, but IMHO, a year off after undergrad makes far more sense than a year off before undergrad. The enlarged skill set should hopefully allow you to try interesting projects in that time, which would typically be a far more useful experience than sitting around and introspecting. Also, there's no fixed you to find out about... You'll keep evolving and changing... So it doesn't make much sense to stop learning/doing for an extended period to analyze :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> That interacting well with people really matters. That it's worth attention and effort.

</comment><comment><USER71> Perfect is the enemy of done

</comment><comment><USER72> I wish I'd discovered writing "Morning Pages" a lot earlier.

I've been doing it for the last year, and it's helped me figure out much better solutions to so many issues in my life, than I would have without the calm, reflective thinking that writing for 30 minutes each morning brings.

Can't recommend it enough.

[https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning- pages/](https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/)

</comment><comment><USER73> Learning how to overcome imposter syndrome.

I didn't come from a top-tier school, didn't work for name companies, and had a zig-zag middle manager career. instead of a meteoric rise through the ranks. Multiple layoffs too. I'll never see my name lauded in a press release.

I've discovered that self-worth is just that - it comes from within.

</comment><comment><USER74> How to Read A Book by Mortimer Adler.

Also, ycombinator/pg essays. Before that I got my business advice from "the apprentice".

The Pattern on the Stone.

</comment><comment><USER75> All of these: [https://jakeseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on- me-t...](https://jakeseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-is). Although if I'd read some earlier, maybe they wouldn't have been so influential.

</comment><comment><USER76> I wish I'd discovered writing ebooks earlier. I enjoy doing it and have completed one, but haven't carved out the time to do another. Earlier in life it would have been far easier to write a number of them, which would likely have led to more career opportunities, if not more "passive" income.

<comment><USER77> Do you have any advice on where to start? any course?

<comment><USER76> Whenever I think about writing an ebook, I write out twenty blog post titles. If I can't get to twenty titles, I don't have enough knowledge or passion to write a whole book.

Then, the one time I wrote an ebook, I blogged each of those twenty titles. I set up a mailing list. I participated in forums on the topic, with my signature linking to the blog posts/email signup form.

Then, after I'd written the blog posts, I used leanpub to pull in the RSS for them. Then I edited them and expanded where needed.

That worked for me once, that's the path I'd take in the future.

Things to realize:

* writing a book is hard. I remember spending an hour on one sentence of my book (just testing to make sure I was correct about a statement).

* technical books have short lives. Tech moves on. That said, people are willing to spend money to save time.

* marketing is at least as hard as writing the book. Prepare to spend time doing this.

* If you aren't using the tech in your work (or won't be in the future) you better love the tech or your book will need changes and you won't want to put in the time.

Here's more about my book launch: [http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1339](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/1339)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> For me Awarness book by De Mello, Anthony has been life-changing and I wish i discovered it earlier in life.

</comment><comment><USER79> * Facebook has been the best dating site for the last 15 years

* Sites like HackerRank, Codility, etc. So fun.

* [https://teachyourselfcs.com/](https://teachyourselfcs.com/)

* Loop Habit Tracker (Android app)

* raylib

* Anki (thanks, HN)

* Queal

* Virtual desktops, took me way too long to start using them, lolsob

* The secret clouds area in 6-2

</comment><comment><USER80> The anatomy of peace, helped stop being stuck and make a turnaround on my mindset and my life.

</comment><comment><USER81> I wish I had discovered that uploading cat videos on YouTube might change one's life ;)

</comment><comment><USER82> \- Setting 3 daily goals every morning.

\- Budget/money planning.

\- The power of writing things done to make them happen.

<comment><USER44> _The power of writing things done to make them happen._

Can you explain your process?

<comment><USER82> Sorry I meant "down"! I write everything down. Purchase decision, budget planning, daily goals, or even meeting agenda.

It is so simple that it's hard to believe how much impact it has.

I believe it takes away all the mental energy you have to put to process things in your mind. And somehow it gives some sort of value and priority to your plan when you write it down. It quickly becomes a discipline and works against procrastination.

One of those things that you always hear it, yet you can't believe it until you try it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Alice Miller's Drama of the gifted child. Discovered the concept of developmental trauma, and unleashed a whole series of discoveries about human personalities and my lifetime struggles with many things in life.

</comment><comment><USER84> There are rarely true "irrational" decisions. If a decision looks irrational to you, it's most likely because you don't truly understand the incentives driving that person.oke

</comment><comment><USER85> Having a Work Journal. There are times that I wished I started one earlier. When I go back at my work journal, I'm amazed how much I have accomplished, even when its something insignificant.

</comment><comment><USER86> My love for "preppy" sports like Golf and Tennis. Growing up I ignored those things because I felt like they were exclusively for boring rich people. I got my first taste of golf after college at a fundraiser that I reluctantly agreed to attend only because a friend was hosting - and I loved it instantly. I started playing Tennis because there is a public park with courts just a few blocks from my house - and I love that too.

Yoga. Another thing that I always assumed was for rich suburban moms and I didn't need to bother with. In my youth that might have been true, but the body ages poorly if you don't take care of it. Yoga is a fantastic way to be mindful/meditate and stretch/exercise.

TL;DR - Don't be so quick to judge that which you have not tried.

I wonder how many other things I have ignored throughout my life because I associated them with some preconvieved belief or stereotype.

<comment><USER87> +1 for your advice and your opinions on Yoga. I always thought it was for hippy/new age types. It wasn't till I tried it myself that my opions completely changed. As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread it's the best exercise I've found for my back pain and I've tried allsorts. If anyone reading this has achy joints, bones, muscles, etc, give it a go. There are thousands of videos on Youtube . Some of the instructors are a little cringe worthy with what they say - but the exercise is solid. I have a friend who's the same age as me (nearly 40) who teaches and trains in BJJ. He frequently fights people half his age (and wins) and he tells me the Yoga really helps him in that sport. If anyone reading this is wondering where to start I can recommend this channel: [https://www.youtube.com/user/lesleyfightmaster/playlists](https://www.youtube.com/user/lesleyfightmaster/playlists)

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> I should have known before was engineering in Computer Science rather than in Mechanical will help me a lot. Nothing too harsh, but I realized coding is fun very late.

</comment><comment><USER89> Anki or space repetition, exercise every day, natural low-sulfer wines

books: thinking fast and slow, black swan/antifragile, why we sleep, the organize mind

<comment><USER7> >natural low-sulfer wines

How is this helpful?

<comment><USER89> wine in small amounts is very good for you, low-sulfer wines reduce hangovers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> AlleAktien — [https://www.alleaktien.de](https://www.alleaktien.de) for German stock ideas

</comment><comment><USER91> The book How to Win Friends and Influence People and weight training for strength - Starting Strength, 5/3/1 etc.

<comment><USER91> Also, if you have a regular work task you need to do, block out time in your diary for it.

And the absolute joy than can come from having children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> If there's one thing in life you want to know before anything else, it's how to get better at things

</comment><comment><USER92> \- Living in the city instead of the suburbs.

\- Living in an apartment/condo; instead of owning a big, stupid house.

</comment><comment><USER93> Intermittent fasting and carnivore diet

</comment><comment><USER94> Peace and understanding after being a 0311 and 0313 in the Marines during 2006-10

</comment><comment><USER95> To never go autopilot mode.

<comment><USER96> need more details

<comment><USER97> this is unachievable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Stoicism. I was unhappy and angry most of my 20s

</comment><comment><USER99> Being underpaid.

</comment><comment><USER100> Hi Op, Can you invite me to Superhuman?

</comment><comment><USER87> For me two things really come to mind: 1\. YNAB (you need a budget) 2\. Yoga

During my 20's & early 30's i had always had a well paid job but nothing to show for it. I also had big overdraft which I'd never done anything about. About 6 years ago I picked up a copy of YNAB 4 for about £8 of Steam. Within 3 months I'd completely changed my spending habits. Roll on a year or two and I'd paid off all my debts. And this program has allowed me to save for some big life events and trips - things I'd have probably borrowed money for in the past. Last year I bought my first car in full without the aid of a loan. The program also helped me when I went self empoyed a few years ago. Both mine and my long term partners finances go thought the program and we know exactly how little money we can live on - this is valuable info if times get hard. The program is basically a spreadsheet with a nice GUI but the methodology behind it work for me. If I'd have found something like this in my early 20's I'd be a lot better of than I am now. But hey, better late than never.

I do Yoga every day. Prior to me getting into Yoga I thought the only real way to exercise was to join a gym. I live in a rural part of the UK, so for me travelling to the gym is timeconsuming. A few years back I'd been suffering back pain due to long stints sitting at a desk all day. I'd also started to put on weight due to inactivity. Anyway, during one painful day I decided to Google "Yoga for back pain". I tried it and I was hooked. Not only did it fix my back pain, it eased it for around 3 days. Since then I've really got into Yoga and try to do at least 20-60 mins a day. Sometimes I might do it twice a day if I know I'm going to be sat down a lot. Like everyone else I have days when I'm worn out - for these days I have a couple of 10 min routines which I try to do. I'm a firm believer of trying to exercise every day, even if it's just for 10 minutes. It's a good habit to have and doing it daily reinforces the habit. Since doing regular practice I don't really get any achy joints. I also do HIT style Yoga 3 times a week which helps with body tone, strengh, and cardio. When you really get into Yoga you realise they're many different styles which can help different aspects of your health. For me, my main driving force was back pain - I've never done any exercise which fixed my back as well as certain Yoga exercises. For me Yoga is great because it's easy and free. You only need a Yoga mat (a beach towel can suffice at the beginning) and Youtube to get started. I keep myself in reasonable shape without having to travel or pay any gym fees. I never knew exercise could be so easy and cheap. I wish I'd known this in my late 20's, when I put on a lot of weight, and was suffering with back pain and other achy bits.

</comment><comment><USER101> How to propagate uncertainties.

Daily journaling.

That I needed glasses.

<comment><USER102> Willing to ellobarate on your actual daily journaling processes. When? Where? Any structure around what you actually write/questions you answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> * MVC programming (went to business school)

* Scikit-learn

* Road bikes

</comment><comment><USER104> How do you look for stuff here

</comment><comment><USER60> Stoicism.

</comment><comment><USER105> Exactly, This is the skillset that you will need for life.

<comment><USER35> What is?

If you're trying to reply to a comment, click "reply" right below it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER107> How do you get to work before 79:30am with a child?

</comment><comment><USER106> Crypto

</comment><comment><USER108> * Full time remote jobs

* Conspicuous Signalling Theory

* The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

* Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault by Stephen R. C. Hicks

* The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard e Hans-Hermann Hoppe

* The Red Pill

* How a Cultural War works and who is waging it against Western Civilization

* Lifting & dieting. The importance of muscle mass for everything in life

* How to cook tasty meals that fits an intense fitness lifestyle

* How hypergamy works (alpha seeds / beta needs)

<comment><USER109> I see you're a fan of Jordan Peterson as well and the red pill philosophies. Do you listen to any content creators on Youtube? My top 3 are Ronin man, Sunrise Hoodie and Coach Red Pill. Many people just see the surface of the various forums and loudest idiots and write the whole thing off as dejected young men in the thralls of misogyny. In reality, they are modern day support groups for men who have have been raised or in relationships with boderline personality women and are going through abandonment trauma and or fucked by their friends and society; the lessons these men have to teach are invaluable and lifestyle it promotes is new age stoicism mixed with self survival and the ability to see through desires and wants for others and yourself.

<comment><USER108> I swear I cleaned up my room so now I'm heading to choose to lift some sacrifices at the gym.

<comment><USER109> Yeah, that the concept I am struggling with now. Picking my damn sacrifice (been struggling to quit cannabis, been using it as a crutch since I was teen)

<comment><USER108> Cleaning the room comes first (as metaphor). Then things will start to align around that and your new, more mature self, will signal you what's the new best use of your time/resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> * Internal Family Systems made me more peaceful

<comment><USER111> Do you have any book recommendation or other sources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> I wish I had discovered interval training and olympic lifting earlier.

</comment><comment><USER113> Thank you for the recommendation

</comment><comment><USER114> Way better than before.

</comment><comment><USER115> I wish I had been diagnosed as gifted earlier (around high school)

For the rest the timing was not that bad

<comment><USER20> If it's any consolation, it's common that children labeled 'gifted' early, either don't live up to the label or are affected by the label negatively.

Even in my own adolescence I watched the most 'gifted' child eat batteries and jump off the roof of the school.

<comment><USER116> I would actually prefer that label early on. I learned from my parents that back in preschool and early primary school i was math genius. Supposedly i astonished the ones administering preschool tests by doing stuff from two grades above effortlessly.

Sadly later on I was stripped of my potential by math teacher in primary school. I solved all exercises by writing the result outright, and she forced me to write down every. single. step.

I got so used to that over course of 3 years, that now I'm slower than average at mental calculations. i cannot do algebra efficiently without a piece of paper anymore.

That teacher is probably the only person in my life i genuinely hate.

<comment><USER35> I have a PhD in maths. Writing down every step is the only way to get things right and be able to verify that (essential for anything that actually matters). The best maths advice I ever got was a high school teacher (not even my teacher) looking at my work and telling me to write down more steps; suddenly my accuracy and speed got way better.

Maths ability varies widely, and I don't think being able to do things a couple of years earlier than your peers is that uncommon or really predicts your later achievements, except for the encouragement of early praise pushing you in that direction.

If you really want to be good at mental calculations, practice that. You haven't lost anything you can't regain. However, pen and paper is more accurate, more permanent, and can often be faster, though it feels slower because you're physically moving a lot. Your hatred is beyond futile, achieving nothing but hurting you and holding you back.

<comment><USER117> Different people need different advice.

I love solving problems and am very good at it but writing things down makes me hate maths, the act of moving the pen is much more effort than the problem itself. I used to stump my professors by solving the problems they were explaining in my head long before they would have gotten to a solution. But then I got diagnosed with ADD after I completed my masters, I can write down things no problem when I'm on medication, but if people forced me to write down everything in school when I were undiagnosed I likely would have dropped out of middle-school and maybe even committed suicide. Several of my siblings dropped out of middle school so that is not an exaggeration.

I don't think that not writing things down held me back, I think it forced me to become creative and learn things properly since I couldn't just follow algorithms blindly like my classmates. So maybe I should be grateful that I was diagnosed late and thus forced to invent my own maths throughout college. I likely would have gotten perfect grades with medication, but I'm pretty sure the things I learned and the intuition I built are way more valuable than grades.

But if someone like you came around and thought I did things wrong then you would have ruined my life. Please don't force that on someone else and when they inevitably fail you just say something like "I guess he wasn't that good after all, nothing I could've done!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> I would open my cryptocurrency project, but if there was an idea that would change the whole world)

</comment><comment><USER116> Merge statements in SQL. Sadly i have to work with piece of shit called firebird, which is both slow and full of exceptions. If you are forced to pick a file based DB - pick sqlite, don't touch firebird.

I also have to work with a database schema designed by someone mentally handicapped - i know for fact that it was designed in early 90s by someone self taught.. and it never had a single refactor. They just migrated their own file-based 'database' to firebird. Sadly this piece of shit software is used very commonly in my field.

Merge statements make complicated updates blazing fast compared to any other way.

That my engineering field is basically dead and i should've changed to software development sooner.</comment>